News Postings

I know what you're thinking. "How can I go on in a world where NASA has failed to name Node 3 of the International Space Station after Stephen Colbert??" Fear not nation! The world of mathematics has already solved the problem.

The prime numbers SB is working to discover have officially been named Colbert Numbers, to honor Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report and leader of the Colbert Nation.

Sure, Colbert has had planes, ice cream, and even bald eagles named after him. But this is the first time he has ever had an intangible concept named after him.

And by definition, all Colbert Numbers are over a million digits long, making them the largest, most important things ever named for anyone, ever.

Seventeen or Bust has already found five Colbert Numbers and we're continuing our search for the final six. We're not just advancing mathematics anymore -- we're uncovering scientific proof of Stephen T. Colbert's greatness!

YOU CAN HELP DISCOVER THE NEXT COLBERT NUMBER: DOWNLOAD SB TODAY! (available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)

Seventeen or Bust users can now run a specially configured version of Prime95 directly on our server!

This represents a huge step forward in terms of speed and efficiency so we're recommending that anyone with previous versions of SB migrate to the new software.

Major Enhancements

• Mac OS X (intel) clients now available!
• Full multi-core support
• 64-bit processor support
• 15% faster per thread than SB v2.5.0
• P-1 factoring (with cEM credit for factors)
• Separate network thread - no delays
• Now communicates on port 80
• 98.2% less network traffic
• Better save-file handling (no registry keys in windows!)

Remember though, this is not a "drop-in" replacement for previous SB clients. This is brand new software. So even if you're a current user, you still have to follow the instructions in "Step 3" on the download page. Also, if your current version of SB is about to finish a full test, try to let it complete before removing SB because you can't migrate workunits.

Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux clients are all available now so
Download and setup the new client!

Special thanks to George Woltman whose work made this release possible.

And drop by the forums if you run into any trouble or have questions about the new client. Thanks for your continued support and for crunching SB!

The discovery of SB's 10th prime last year was a huge breakthrough for SB. But now it has also helped prove a new mathematical theorem as well.

Phil Moore and I were recently able to author and publish a journal paper in INTEGERS that establishes the Mixed Sierpinski Theorem.

Huge thanks to Phil Moore for his independent verification of the prime 67607 + 2^16389 and for spearheading the effort to formally publish our research.

Thanks are also in order for legendary prime researcher and co-author Payam Samidoost whose foundational work with dual primes forms the basis of our proof. And of course, none of this would be computationally feasible without GIMPS founder and co-author George Woltman.

The full paper is available here or you can retrieve it directly from INTEGERS by scrolling down to paper #A61 here.

Thanks again to all SB participants for everything you do. We really appreciate you. Have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful 2009!

33661•2^7031232+1 is prime! The double checking effort uncovered this new prime showing once again why it is so important to conduct these re-testing efforts. Most re-tests conclusively verify the original result but if the first test had even a single memory error during the computation, there's a chance a prime could have been missed. That's what likely happened here. The discoverer, Sturle Sunde is a giant in the prime searching world. He is the #2 overall contributor to SB and also the #4 all-time contributor to GIMPS!

This result was reported at 2:03PM EST on October 17th. We've checked and re-checked the primality several times and have now submitted it to The Prime Page where it currently stands as the 10th largest known prime number ever discovered [2,116,617 digits].

Sturle, a member of team Busty Seventeen from Oslo, Norway tells us that he started crunching SB 4 years ago to "give [him] a new set of work outside of GIMPS." He currently has 160 computers crunching GIMPS and another 110 crunching SB. Only 10 of his computers were running the crucial double-check work that lead to this new discovery. He manages all his computers from the University of Oslo with intelligent scripts that only utilize them when other users aren't logged in.

We've opened a thread to comment on the discovery in the forums. Our records confirm Sturle completed over 9,000 tests before finding this result so he is quite a deserving discoverer. That said, he couldn't have done it alone and neither could we. You all keep this effort going with your dedicated crunching and your contributions are what led to this latest find. Congratulations to the entire Seventeen or Bust community!

19249 * 2^13018586 + 1 is prime!!!! SB has done it again, discovering a new largest ever non-Mersenne prime. This latest result was submitted at 00:33 EST on March 26th by Konstantin Agafonov, a member of team TSC! Russia. Konstantin is from Korolev, Russia where he works as a systems administrator for a construction company.

Before joining SB, Konstantin participated in other DC projects like Find-a-Drug, where he was the 5th largest overall contributor! Konstantin says he has used up to 100 computers on SB. This particular prime was found on one of his 3GHz Pentium 4s running Windows.

To read more about the discovery, check out the official Press Release.

Thanks to all our dedicated number crunching volunteers... some of whom have been crunching for five years now! Every one of you helped make this discovery possible! Congratulations and Happy Cinco de Mayo!

4847 * 2^3321063 + 1 is prime! This is great news as k=4847 was a relatively dense series that required more tests in a given range than the average k. The prime was discovered at 10:50PM EST on October 15th by Richard Hassler, a long-time user who has been crunching SB since August 2003.

You may notice that this prime is smaller than the last few discoveries we've made (only 999744 digits [decimal expansion]). That's because this prime was uncovered by a double check. Hopefully those of us disappointed by the artificial slowdown that double checks have caused recently are pleased that it resulted in a new discovery so quickly. We're working to correct the scoring system so that these tests are worth as much per amount of computation as larger ones. Until we do, keep in mind that although the scoring has temporarily decreased, the ease of finishing a test has gone up which does improve your chances of actually finding a prime.

Congratulations to the whole SB community! These primes are rare so take a moment to appreciate all the hard work that goes into producing them. Each SB participant helped do their part to increase the bounds of human knowledge with this discovery. Be proud of your accomplishment! 9 down -- 8 to go.

SB v2.5.0 is now available for Win32 and Linux (and FreeBSD!) on the download page.

Changes:

27653 * 2^9167433 + 1 is prime!!!! This prime weighs in at 2,759,677 digits [decimal expansion available], making it the largest non-Mersenne prime ever discovered and the 5th largest currently known prime of any form. The result was submitted at 01:25:29 EST on June 8th by Derek Gordon, a member of team LEDS. Derek is a true SB veteran. He signed up in May 2002, before we had discovered a single prime. It was back when we were only testing k=27653. So it's only fitting that after 3 years, he's the one who finally eliminated the original SB multiplier, k=27653. This will save us lots of retesting. A huge boost for the project.

Before joining SB, Derek was involved with other DC projects like Distributed.net and GIMPS. He now uses all 3 of his personal computers and 6 work computers for SB exclusively. The computer that found the prime was his Pentium 4 Windows machine at Leading Edge Design.

To read more about the discovery, check out the official Press Release.

As always, a big shout out to all our SB crunchers. None of these discoveries would be possible without the dedication of thousands of users worldwide crunching numbers. You are the heart and soul of Seventeen or Bust and this discovery is dedicated to you. Congratulations!

SB v2.4.0 is now available for Win32, Linux, and FreeBSD on the download page.

The client has been tested and should have no problems, but head on over to the forums to post any problems/comments.

Changes:

Due to all the spam and no easy way to get rid of it, I've put a new wiki up at http://wiki.seventeenorbust.com. Feel free to check it out and utilize it more than our old one, it's running MediaWiki (the same as wikipedia) and is much more powerfull.

The old one is still accessable via this link if you need anything off of it.

-Alien88

I've been getting a lot of emails lately asking me what I'm up to these days. So I thought I'd post an update here to let everyone know what this SB co-Founder is doing.

I've taken a full-time position in Austin Texas working for Fundable Group, Inc., the developers of Fundable, a new system designed for online fundraising and group purchases.

It's a fun job and it's been really fun recently. The site just premiered last week so everyone here is pumped about it being public now.

Check out the site and send me an email letting me know what you think. We're still young enough to consider good feedback so if you have new and exciting ideas we're listening. :)

Cheers,
Louie

28433 * 2^7830457 + 1 is prime!$#!@!! It weighs in at 2,357,207 digits, sliding in as the fourth-largest known. The result was submitted to the server by a machine in the U.S. at 11:43 PM EST on December 30, after just over two days of crunching. The machine's owner, a member of TeamPrimeRib, has asked to remain anonymous.

What else can I say, except GREAT JOB! This is surely as strong a sign as ever that this project has a great future. And it's only possible because of all of you. So pat yourselves on the back, break out the bubbly (if you have any left from New Years) and celebrate! This is everyone's victory.

Deserving special thanks is our host, voxel.net, who have been simply amazing. If you're in the market for hosting services, please consider supporting them, and help them continue to support us! Thanks also to George Woltman of GIMPS for continually cranking out faster and faster crunch code, and to everyone involved with the sieve, factoring, and other third-party tool efforts. Finally, very special thanks indeed to Fritz Redeker, without whom we'd still be running a rusting Duron server in a forgotten basement in Michigan.

And one more time: GREAT JOB!!!!!!

P.S. Upgrade to ver. 2.3 as soon as possible! Massive speedups for non-SSE2 machines, and serious bugs fixed from ver. 2.2. You really, really want this upgrade!

For those of you who were having problems with the Linux client due to old versions of glibc, the client has been recompiled. I'm also including a version that contains only the binary for upgrading.

A very critical bug was found by KenG6 of Team Anandtech and has now been fixed. The bug only effects Windows machines with non SSE2 processors. This means that Linux/FreeBSD/BeOS are not affected by the bug.

We ask that you spread the word about this new client, because it is very important that v2.2.0 windows clients are upgraded to v2.3.0. Due to the nature of this bug and the possibility of missing a prime, in a few weeks we will stop accepting work from the Windows v2.2.0 client. At that point, the v2.2.0 windows tests will be reassigned and restested to make sure we did not miss a prime. The server will not accept work from the Windows v2.2.0 at that time.

We have also fixed a minor bug with the Linux and FreeBSD clients and we ask that you upgrade those clients too. Altho the bug is not near as serious as the Windows bug, if you were to abort a test in the first 10 minutes it would lead to an invalid residue.

Please head over to the download page get the new client. We thank KenG6 for finding this bug.

--
Mike Garrison

George Woltman recently finished work on a new gwmult core. The enhanced IBDWT algorithm that Pentium4 users have been enjoying is now available to all.

AthlonXP's get a 90-110% speed improvement (2x faster!!) Preliminary benchmarks show smaller, but meaningful improvements for older P2/3 and celeron processors.

Everyone should upgrade because there are also fixes for certain large tests (n > 9M) and we want everyone using v2.2 or higher by the time we start testing there.

DOWNLOAD NOW!
WINDOWS, Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS are all available! Remember, install over the old client to keep your current test and username. Don't uninstall first.

Cheers,
Louie

A new client is available for P4, Opteron, and AMD64 users. There is an algorithmic improvement over the previous v1 clients which makes it 50-200% faster.

GET YOUR v2 CLIENTS HERE (SSE2 ONLY):
WINDOWS
LINUX(Binary Only)
BeOS (Binary Only)

Cheers,
Louie

The great people who host our machine have introduced a new line of hosting, known as voxrox.

They have great deals on high performance dedicated servers such as a P4-3GHZ w/ HT and 1.2TB of bandwidth for only $149/month.

When you order a server, tell them SB sent you!

As always, thanks to Voxel.net and Fritz for their donations.

Head on over to this url and make sure that your client does not have the old server IP hardcoded into it and also that your machines are not one of the ones that isn't doing work.

SB v1.2.5 Windows is now available on the download page.

The client has been tested and should have no problems, but head on over to the forums to post any problems/comments.

Changes:

Head on over to the download page and get the new Linux and FreeBSD client.

Kerry Jones (MathGuy) has finished a new version of his service installer for SB. After a few weeks of testing, it appears to improve performance with no known bugs.

If you'd like a way to run SB as a windows service, head over to the Download Page to pick up the newest version of SB packaged with a new version of the Windows Service installer. This allows SB to run on machines even when no one is logged in which is perfect for lab machines you admin. It also can run in the background without the icon appearing so that said lab users don't accidentily stop or close SB.

Anyone using v1.2 or lower of the service installer is encouraged to upgrade.

Cheers,
Louie

New client is finished. Lots of improvements. Here is a list of major differences:

A year and two weeks ago, Seventeen or Bust announced its first major accomplishment – the discovery of a 210,186-digit prime number and the first of seventeen multipliers to be eliminated from the search. As many of our participants will remember, a truly extraordinary month followed. Prime after prime was announced, culminating on Christmas Day with the discovery of a 402,569-digit prime.

Almost a year later, and only a few weeks ago, our friends at the GIMPS project announced their discovery of a record-breaking Mersenne prime. Roughly six million digits long, this discovery raised our own hopes, and we began to wonder when our own next discovery would come.

Long have we waited. And now, at last, the waiting has paid off.

5359•2^5054502+1 is prime!!!

On 6 December 2003, at 3:42:02 PM EST, the 1,521,561-digit prime was reported to the server. Due to the size of the number, it took 7 days to verify. The number weighs in as the 4th largest prime ever discovered. The story of the lucky participant, Randy Sundquist [stats], fits well with the discovery's timing:

"The prime was found on a computer I made out of old parts for my sister, who is going to school in Madison, WI. I installed the client to test the machine for a few days. The first and only work it did resulted in the prime!"

Randy is the founding member of Team ExtremeDC and has been crunching SB for over a year. He sometimes runs up to 20 SB client machines. The lucky machine he built for his sister is an 800 MHz Duron with 256 MB of RAM. This machine completed the Proth test in 10 days and 20 hours.

A press release and a decimal expansion of the number are coming soon. We want to thank you all for your participation, and hope that this discovery reminds everyone that you do make a difference! Merry Christmas, and happy hunting!

UPDATE: The prime has already been listed in Chris Caldwell's record book as the 4th largest prime ever. It is also the world's largest non-mersenne prime. -Louie

This addresses an issue that can cause P4 systems to crash with large exponents above 5M. If you have a P4 or other system that uses SSE2 instructions, please upgrade immediately to SB v1.11

Here are the new features (listed in the *newly included* README.TXT):

-P4 SSE2 code improvements -- 10% faster
-test abandoning code removed
-multiple open socket bug fixed
-removed blocking network calls (i.e. occasional hangs @ 100%)
-more verbose logging on intermediate block transmissions
-registry hook for Mathguy's service added (sb-mg.exe no longer needed)
-Mathguy's service installer (v1.6) now packaged with main distribution
-can now finish test without downloading new one if desired
-new registry hooks for future add-on features (queuing)
-in-client signup interface improved
-no longer asks users to clear cache when entering first username
-uninstall fuction actually works now

There are many networking and performance issues addressed with this release so please upgrade. Linux/FreeBSD and BeOS versions to follow. Windows: Download now.

Many of you have requested a service install of SB. There is now an SB service installer availible and discussed on our Public forum! It was written by fellow SB participant MathGuy. He's been in contact with me and other SB users and made a very, very nice package. Here is a quick list of the newest features:

-Supports up to 32-processors
-Automatically sets processor affinity
-Hyperthreading optimizations
-Can hide icon in task bar
-Automatically restarts "stalled" clients
-Client runs when no one is logged onto system
-Can set SB to absolute minimum priority, technically one level lower than Idle in SB.

Info on the service install and links to download can be found here.

It looks at though the in-client signup may be incorrectly reporting errors. If you recieve an error while signing up, please disreguard. The problem will be fixed shortly.

If you sign up and recieve an email with a password to access the site, the signup worked fine.

In the mean time, I recommend you use the online signup form. Once you download the client, just press the "Existing User" button rather than signing up again. Thanks. :)

At 2016 GMT on 22 December 2002, SB's fifth prime discovery was reported to the block server! The prime, 54767•2^1337287+1, has been verified, and is the largest yet. At 402,569 decimal digits, this prime is the 7th largest in the world! SB is now a Top 10 prime hunting machine!

Congratulations to Peter Coels (craco) of team EBT, our newest prime discoverer from Belgium!

Like many of our users, Peter has been involved in other distributed computing projects. "I was getting slightly bored with SETI." Peter has been running SB for the past few months on 8 computers (2 at home, 6 at work) and was recently seen posting on the EBT forums that ".. If only one of the EBT-gang could find a prime, that would be great... ". Merry Christmas Peter -- you got your wish. :)

The decimal expansion will soon be with the expansion of all previous primes now in the public documents section.

Merry Christmas everyone. Have a great holiday with your loved ones and a happy New Year in 2003!

Wishing you the best,
-The SB Team

Could the Seventeen or Bust network be powerful enough to place it among the world's 50 most powerful supercomputers?

It looks that way, according to a listing of the greatest supercomputers published at top500.org. Our current power estimate of 1.3 THz, if accurate, would place it at #33 in the world-wide list.

Of course, Seventeen or Bust isn't just a supercomputer. It's a world-wide network of personal computer users who have assembled their resources for a common goal. Together, SB participants rival the power of even the world's best supercomputers. That's something to be proud of, and we're really excited for all our users. Thanks for making SB a huge (and growing!) success.

Seventeen or Bust is finally starting to settle back into the normal routine. The hardware upgrade is complete (for the immediate future, at least), the new server and website setup are completely in place, and we're getting close to having all the bugs worked out.

We thank you for all your patience during the last several days; things hadn't gone nearly as smoothly as we'd hoped, but even still, we think the improvement was well worth the downtime.

I'd also like to congratulate everyone on the success we've had. It's really good to see so many people coming out to support the project, and I hope you're all getting as much enjoyment out of it as I am (and I'm sure Louie, too).

On a side note, let's get going on that next prime. Not to be superstitious, but I'd rather not hover around the name "thirteen or bust" for any longer than we have to. :-) Good luck, and happy crunching!!

At 0057 GMT on 7 December 2002, SB's fourth prime discovery was reported to the block server! The prime, 69109•2^1157446+1, has been verified, and it's the largest yet, weighing in at 348,431 digits. This places it as the 17th largest prime ever discovered.

Congratulations to Sean DiMichele (SeanD) of team Anandtech, whose 2.2 GHz P4 machine reported the prime after 3 hours 36 minutes of computation.

The decimal expansion and the expansion of all previous primes can now be found in our new public documents section.

Great work, everyone, and remember: the next one could be you!

At 1005 GMT on Thursday, 5 December 2002, a third probable prime was reported to our server! We have confirmed that 44131•2^995972+1 is prime! This is unbelievable. Congratulations to deviced, the lone member of team deviced. The prime was found by a P3-833, his only computer running SB! The test had actually been assigned since 02 December 2002 but was not immediately finished because the computer wasn't running tests 24/7. So if you've been thinking that you can't find a prime without a cluster of multiple computers, this goes to show that anyone obviously can. :-) We have not been able to contact deviced for comment (if you're reading this and you are deviced, email Dave at danorris@uiuc.edu).

Anyway, good work guys. Keep crunching. 3 down, 14 to go.

After many, many unforseen problems, the new system is online. The system is not at its peak performance, so the website may be sluggish or you may experience problems. It will be down again for some time in the future for hardware upgrades. However, the new site is online and is very very cool.

NOTE! Passwords for old users have been randomly generated and were sent out on the afternoon of 9 December. If you have any problems logging in, just email us.

For now, enjoy the new site! We encourage you to read about the changes that have been made to the new system, as many things work VERY differently now. See the upgrade page for more information.

At 0349 GMT on Tuesday, 3 December, a second probable prime was reported to the server. We have verified that 65567•2^1013803+1, weighing in at 305,190 digits, is prime! Its length makes it the 21st largest prime ever discovered. Congratulations to James Burt (a.k.a. Beyond, of TeamBeOS) whose 2 GHz Pentium 4 reported the probable prime.

"I worked on George Woltman's project [Prime95] for a while but never found anything. Then your project came along so now I run all my machines on Seventeen or Bust." James runs SB on quite a nice farm of computers.

The decimal expansion of the number is available.
A press release is also available.

Two down. Fifteen to go. Keep up the good work!

At 0601 GMT on the morning of Wednesday, 27 November 2002, a participant's machine reported the first probable prime to our server! Five hours later we had confirmed that 46157•2^698207+1 is, indeed, prime!! This is a landmark victory for the entire SB network. Great job, everyone! Congratulations to Stephen Gibson (aka S0rcerer, of TeamTNT), the lucky user that first reported the prime.

The decimal expansion of the number is available.
A press release is also available.

Special thanks to:
Mike Garrison - server hosting
George Woltman - code contributions
Yves Gallot - original inspiration
Ian Lowman - previous searcher of k=46157
Wilfrid Keller - previous organizer of the Sierpinski search
Paul Jobling - NewPGen authoring
Phil Carmody - sieve data contributions

To everyone who helped make this project possible, we sincerely thank you!

This release will fix the segmentation faults that have been occurring. Also, the forum address had to be updated last night. Let us know if there is a broken link we didn't update.

This release fixed several small bugs including the segmentation fault when interrupting during final block submission. This release is ONLY for the systems listed above; there is no 1.0.1 release for Windows.

This is a major upgrade, and all users are urged to upgrade as soon as possible. New features include:

• residue format improved
• BeOS: client now works! :-)
• Linux: segmentation fault bug fixed
• Linux: code realignment may improve performance
• blocks-remaining count now more accurate
• no longer tracks irrelevant network usage statistics
• Win: intermediate block transmission now saves to registry
• Win: installer now detects previous install and sets default directory accordingly
• Win: no longer gives error messages on the first block after upgrading from 0.9.7 or lower
• Win: block completion time may now be correct when intermediate blocks are off

We have decided to begin testing another multiplier, k = 33,661, for the time being. We have tested the current multiplier, k = 27,653, to a sufficiently high bound that our chances of finding a prime are very low, and we feel it's in the project's best interests to start increasing the bounds on the other 16 multipliers before returning to k = 27,653.